I've continued listening to The Flop House and have grown to appreciate it without reservation. It has all the requisite insight and humor that you need from a bad movie podcast. It helps that I've become desensitized to Elliott Kalan. Once you cross that line, The Flop House is easy to love.
How Did This Get Made is still better, though. And listening to this rival podcast is illustrating why HDTGM is so good.
HDTGM benefits by taking the movies seriously. They take notes and do some preparation. (The Flop House guys don't.) They embrace the absurdity of the exercise and go at it with the full force of their analytical powers. The Flop House is more tangent-focused, and when their interest wanes, they just use the bad movies as an excuse to tell jokes. That works, but it's a less intense and ultimately less fulfilling experience than HDTGM, whose hosts completely bury themselves in the movie. I can't imagine Elliott & co. digging into Sleepaway Camp in the same way, for example. They don't care enough.
HDTGM deconstructs enough that they're able to extract humor from the movie itself; they're less dependent on tangents and silliness and references. They're able to conjure some kind of enthusiasm even for the most boring bad movies; in those cases, Jason's anger somehow keeps things afloat. When HDTGM watches a bad bad movie, the result is exhaustion, which can be entertaining. When The Flop House watches a bad bad movie, they can get a little depressed, which is less enjoyable. It probably helps that the HDTGM hosts are all experienced actors and know how to keep things fun.
The Flop House guys for some reason limit their selection to recent releases. There is no good reason for that; all it means is that they have a somewhat poor track record of finding good bad movies. HDTGM for example just did Zardoz. I would love to hear a Flop House podcast on that.
